In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, New York City’s flagship public television station, WNET, has dropped the richest man in New York, carbon pollution billionaire David Koch, from its board of trustees. Days before the monthly board meeting on May 16, Koch’s name was removed from the WNET website. Koch had been a board member since 2006. Koch has been funding WNET since 1986.

The severance of Koch’s longstanding relationship with WNET — which not only serves the New York City area but also produces national programs such as Charlie Rose, Nature, and Great Performances — comes at a time of increasing tension between Koch’s anti-regulatory, climate-polluting industrial empire and the educational mission of public television.

The inherent conflict between Koch’s conspiratorial, anti-science ideology and the public interest with has come under attention in recent months. After Superstorm Sandy struck, WNET’s Charlie Rose and Bill Moyers ran shows on the tragic consequences and threat of greenhouse pollution for the New York region. More recently, reports of Koch Industries’ interest in the newspaper holdings of the Tribune Company have spurred nationwide protests.

Koch also was featured in the November 2012 PBS documentary Park Avenue, which contrasted the extreme wealth of Koch’s residence at 740 Park Avenue with the stark poverty less than a mile north in East Harlem. In the documentary, a former doorman noted that Koch, with a net worth of about $45 billion, gives only $50 holiday tips.

Just after Koch left the WNET board, the station ran a major live town hall on Superstorm Sandy. Broadcasting from New Jersey and New York City, the NY/NJ/Long Island affiliates under WNET management broadcast a two-hour show that talked repeatedly about the major threat posed by climate change in rising sea levels and more frequent storms of increased intensity — threats which Koch’s Cato Institute denies.

In anticipation of today’s piece on the Kochs in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, Koch Industries issued a conspiratorial rant accusing her of running a “left-leaning” “smear” campaign, in coordination with “MSNBC, ThinkProgress, The New York Times, NPR, The Nation, Mother Jones, Huffington Post and more”:

Jane Mayer’s Agenda

As campaigns and attacks against Koch Industries and its shareholders go, the one led by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker has been consistent, if nothing else – consistent in its left-leaning bias, baseless accusations, and numerous inaccuracies.
Since lobbing her opening salvo against us in an August 2010 article that was riddled with biases and inaccuracies and based on research by a ThinkProgress blogger, Mayer has authored nearly a dozen screeds attacking Koch Industries, Charles Koch and David Koch. Her latest submission, soon to be published, will be another attempt to smear us while advancing her partisan agenda. We don’t precisely know the content of her story. However, based on her questions to us, we believe it will be an attempt to promote a fleeting PBS show that aired six months ago – one on which she collaborated and in which she appeared. The show attacked David Koch and Charles Koch, with Mayer making an appearance as an interviewee.
We also believe Mayer will work hard to make the case that should Koch purchase the Tribune newspapers, as is rumored, we would use those papers to advance a particular agenda. This assertion, of course, is made with no basis in fact or history to support such a claim.
Mayer’s tale about us will likely be promoted in all the usual places – MSNBC, ThinkProgress, The New York Times, NPR, The Nation, Mother Jones, Huffington Post and more.
Once we see it, we will fact check it and set the record straight here on KochFacts.

Koch is still on the board of trustees of WGBH, the prominent Boston-based PBS affiliate which produces major series such as Masterpiece, Antiques Roadshow, and the science show NOVA.

Note: Forecast the Facts members are participating in the campaign to discourage the Tribune Company from selling its papers to the Koch brothers.

(Credit: Robert F. Bukaty, AP)

Fishing is a profession often passed down from one generation to the next. Many lobstermen in Maine fish the same bottom their fathers and grandfathers fished, and the same holds true of fishermen father offshore as well. Yet increasingly, anecdotal evidence has suggested that the old faithful fishing spots are no longer quite so reliable.

In northern regions these shifts could lead to conflicts over fishing rights and access to traditional fishing grounds. In the tropics, the problem could be more dire. As our oceans warm, species may not be able to adapt at all, leaving tropical oceans with severely depleted fish stocks and some of the most vulnerable human populations with a distinct shortage of a vital protein source.

Much of this scarcity of native species can be attributed to overfishing, a practice now largely halted in U.S. waters thanks to strict new science-based management tactics implemented as a result of a 2006 reauthorization of the law that governs our fisheries. But increasingly, both scientists and fishermen have been eying climate change as a reason some fish are showing up in new places and the catch fishermen are accustomed to finding have been surprisingly slow to rebuild.

A new study published this week in the journal Nature puts some peer-reviewed punch behind what up until now was a common-sense theory. Most fish have a preference for a certain water temperature range, and because they are mobile creatures, as water warms due to climate change, fish populations are on the move toward the poles. The study found:

Except in the tropics, catch composition in most ecosystems 
slowly changed to include more warm-water species and fewer cool-water species. In the tropics, the catch followed a similar pattern from 1970 to 1980 and then stabilized, likely because there are no species with high enough temperature preferences to replace those that declined. Statistical models showed that the increase in warm-water species was significantly related to increasing ocean temperatures.

This latest research builds on the authors’ 2009 study that stated:

…climate change may lead to large-scale redistribution of global catch potential, with an average of 30–70% increase in high-latitude regions and a drop of up to 40% in the tropics.

This trend could have dire implications for both fishermen and fish.

As U.S. fishermen are increasingly operating under management systems that set the total amount of fish they can catch based on their historic landings, this kind of habitat shift can lead to complex management conundrums. If a fisherman from Massachusetts is suddenly catching more summer flounder (which prefer warmer water) and less winter flounder (which prefer colder water) but his catch allocation was set based on his history of catching winter flounder, his business will not last.

Meanwhile the New Jersey fisherman’s boat may not be equipped to catch the species that will replace summer flounder in his waters so he will either have to move with the fish into an area where he may not be permitted to fish, or invest in new gear and face the possibility of learning a new fishing method entirely. Neither is an attractive option.

In tropical regions, particularly in less-developed countries, the results could be much worse. Fish is the primary source of protein for more than three billion people on the planet, many of them in less-developed tropical countries. But in their case, the fish that migrate out of their waters won’t be replaced by anything. This is not a question of parsing out a different mix of fish. It will result in a complete loss of a major food source.

And if it’s bad for the people who depend on the fish for protein, it’s worse for the fish themselves. As Daniel Pauly, one of the new study’s authors put it in an interview with NPR on Wednesday, “imagine a reef fish that is driven by temperature into North Carolina or the Delaware coast. That reef fish will not find reefs. It’s like you having to move, but you cannot take your furniture with you, or your house.”

The challenge of rebuilding today’s depleted fish populations is already a herculean one for fishery managers to address. Unfortunately, it now appears they’re going to have add the complexity of tomorrow’s warming and acidifying oceans to the equation.

But a low sensitivity would mean that aggressive action to reduce CO2 emissions starting now would have a modestly higher chance of keeping total warming below 4°F and averting the worst impacts. That’s the point of New Scientist‘s article, “A second chance to save the climate” on a new sensitivity study in Nature Geoscience:

“If we are lucky and the climate sensitivity is at the low end, and we have a strong agreement in 2015, then I think we stand a chance to limit climate change to 2 °C,” says Corinne Le Quéré of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich, UK. “But there’s a lot of ifs.”

If this new study is accurate, then near-term surface warming might be less than expected. But as the lead author Oxford’s Dr. Alexander Otto told the BBC, “We would all like climate sensitivity to be lower but it isn’t.”

The researchers say the difference between the lower short-term estimate and the more consistent long-term picture can be explained by the fact that the heat from the last decade has been absorbed into and is being stored by the world’s oceans.

Recent studies make clear the ocean is warming quite fast, as (see “Global Warming Has Accelerated In Past 15 Years, New Study Of Oceans Confirms” and here). If, as many climatologists believe, some of that ocean heat is released to the surface in the next decade or two, that would reverse the recent slowdown in the rate of surface warming.

Also, many other recent studies find that the climate is more sensitive than we expected:

• Last Time CO2 Levels Hit 400 Parts Per Million The Arctic Was 14°F Warmer!
• Observations Support Predictions Of Extreme Warming And Worse Droughts This Century

Indeed, the new study does little to eliminate the confusion about sensitivity. The media continue to conflate and confuse climate sensitivity with how much warming will we subject our children and countless future generations to (see here and below).

Another related source of confusion is conflating “climate sensitivity” — which generally refers to the change in the global surface temperatures (absent major feedbacks) — with how sensitive the climate itself is to changes in temperature.

For instance, our climate models wildly underestimate what’s happening in the Arctic right now:

Arctic sea ice is melting much, much faster than even the best climate models had projected (actual observations in red). The reason is most likely unmodeled amplifying feedbacks. The image (from Climate Crocks via Arctic Sea Ice Blog) comes from a 2007 GRL research paper by Stroeve et al.

And considerable recent research suggests that our climate in turn is much more sensitive to Arctic ice loss than we ever thought:

• Arctic Warming Favors Extreme, Prolonged Weather Events ‘Such As Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells And Heat Waves’
• NOAA Bombshell: Warming-Driven Arctic Ice Loss Is Boosting Chance of Extreme U.S. Weather
• How Arctic Ice Loss Amplified Superstorm Sandy — Oceanography Journal

Finally, since the media keep misreporting the issue, here once again are the four factors that determine how much warming we are going to inflict on future generations:

1. The so-called “equilibrium climate sensitivity” – the sensitivity of the climate to fast feedbacks like sea ice and water vapor. The ECS, which is typically the focus of modeling studies like the new one discussed above, is how much warming you get if we suddenly adopt a super-aggressive effort to cut carbon pollution and only double CO2 emissions to 560 ppm — and there are no major “slow” feedbacks.  We know the fast feedbacks, like water vapor, are strong by themselves (see Study: Water-vapor feedback is “strong and positive,” so we face “warming of several degrees Celsius” and Skeptical Science piece here).
2. The actual CO2 concentration level we hit, which on our current emissions path is far, far beyond 550 ppm (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories are being realised” — 1000 ppm).
3. The real-world slower (decade-scale) feedbacks, such as tundra melt (see “Carbon Feedback From Thawing Permafrost Will Likely Add 0.4°F – 1.5°F To Total Global Warming By 2100“).
4. Where they live — since people who live in the mid-latitudes (like most Americans) are projected to warm considerably more than the global average.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in 2007 that equilibrium climate sensitivity was in the range of 2.0-4.5C. The new study has a similar range, 0.9-5.0C.

Actual warming this century on our current emissions path is all but certain to be catastrophic, even if ECS is closer to 2°C than 3°C or more.

Related Posts:

• “Memo To Media: ‘Climate Sensitivity’ Is NOT The Same As Projected Future Warming, World Faces 10°F Rise

(Source: Suncor Energy Inc., BLM)

The Canadian government has nearly doubled its spending to promote the Keystone XL pipeline to $16.5 million, up from $9 million a year ago.

This dramatic spending increase is a result of an increased lobbying effort the government is planning, which includes high-profile ad buys and dispatching a series of officials to reiterate talking points that the pipeline will increase U.S. energy security and provide us with thousands of home-grown jobs.

Their expanded lobbying efforts include Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper traveling to New York City to speak with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and participate in roundtables with American business leaders. During his Q&A session with the CFR, Mr. Harper advocated for approval of the pipeline, insisting it would add “almost nothing globally” to carbon emissions.

Harper’s claim just isn’t true — extracting crude from the oil sands is an incredibly energy intensive process that emits 3 to 4 times more greenhouse gases than producing conventional crude oil, making it one of the world’s dirtiest forms of fuels. Approving Keystone would more than double the production of carbon-intensive tar sands by 2024, leading to an increase in greenhouse gases equivalent to adding 8 million cars on the road every year. Without the pipeline, tar sands production is expected to fall flat by 2020.

Prime Minister Harper also said the US should not “turn up” its nose at the potential of 40,000 construction jobs nor the prospect of being able to reduce its dependence on oil shipped in from overseas.

Again, Harper is just avoiding the facts — the State Department released a draft environmental impact statement earlier this year that found the pipeline would directly only create “3,900″ temporary construction jobs. After construction is complete, the operation of the pipeline would support 35 permanent and 15 temporary jobs, with “negligible socioeconomic impacts.” The State Department’s report, which was written by a private consulting firm with links to the pipeline’s owner, also made clear that at least some of Keystone’s oil will be refined and exported in response to “lower domestic gasoline demand and continued higher demand and prices in overseas markets.” The pipeline will add nothing to U.S. energy security and is simply a way for the oil industry to sell refined fuel at higher prices available overseas.

In addition to winning America’s approval of the pipeline, Canadian officials are fighting against a European Union plan that would label tar sands as more polluting than crude oil. According to Reuters, the EU’s executive commission developed a Fuel Quality Directive as part of a plan to cut greenhouse gases from transport fuel that would single out Alberta’s oil sands as more polluting than conventional crude oil, a move that Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said is unfair and could damage Canada’s bid to find new export markets.

Dr. James Hansen, the climate scientist who issued the clearest warning of the 20th century about the dangers of global warming, accused the Canadian government of acting as the industry’s tar sands salesman and “holding a club” over the UK and European nations to accept its “dirty” oil. “Oil from tar sands makes sense only for a small number of people who are making a lot of money from that product,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “It doesn’t make sense for the rest of the people on the planet. We are getting close to the dangerous level of carbon in the atmosphere and if we add on to that unconventional fossil fuels, which have a tremendous amount of carbon, then the climate problem becomes unsolvable.”

While Canada may be ramping up their bid to receive approval of their pipeline, the bottom line is that Keystone is a gateway to a huge pool of carbon-intensive fuel, most of which must be left in the ground if humanity is to avoid a devastating climate impacts that may be beyond any plausible plans of “adaptation.”

Credit: Community Alliance with Family Farmers

After this year’s dismal snowpack survey predicted a serious water shortage for huge swaths of California’s farmland, some farmers are investigating an ancient technique called “dry farming.” As the Sacramento Bee highlighted last week, farmers in the Central Valley, which supplies a quarter of the American food supply, have started experimenting with conserving reservoir water and relying only on rainwater to sustain crops.

Dry farming is risky, as it requires farmers to gamble on rainfall, trap it in the soil, and sustain it for long dry spells. Much of the state experienced record low rainfalls in the past year. And climate change threatens to reduce precipitation even more. But immediate concern over the valley’s fast-depleting groundwater stores has prompted farmers to take the risk — with some success.

According to a study by the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, a 250-acre vineyard practicing dry farming in Napa has conserved roughly 64,000 gallons of water per acre each year. About 2,000 out of half a million acres of vineyards are dry-farmed.

Dry-farming, a common practice for centuries, seemed to dwindle in popularity in the past few decades as farmers relied more on surface irrigation. But proponents of the practice swear that dry-farmed crops, while smaller than their conventional counterparts, have more concentrated nutrients and stronger flavors due to lower water absorption.

The past year’s record low rainfall has left California farmers desperate for solutions. Bracing themselves for droughts that will only grow longer and more severe with climate change, farmers are looking for water-conserving alternatives to currently unsustainable practices. Besides dry-farming, farmers are adopting more efficient irrigation systems, creating water storage areas like on-farm ponds, and developing drought-resistant crops.

Farmers were hit hard by last year’s dry growing season, with yields in corn-heavy states plummeting to 30-year lows. The nation’s wheat and livestock supplies have also been decimated over the past year. The USDA has been forced to bail out drought-stricken farmers by buying up millions of pounds of meat. As a result, food prices are sky-high and many experts fear a global food shortage.

Related Post:

• Oxfam Warns Climate Change And Extreme Weather Will Cause Food Prices To Soar

America cannot solve a global problem by itself. But as Mr. Obama rightly observed in his inaugural address, the United States, as both major polluter and world leader, has a deep obligation to help shield the international community from rising sea levels, floods, droughts and other devastating consequences of a warming planet.

The prospects for broad-based Congressional action putting a price on carbon emissions are nil. The House is run by people who care little for environmental issues generally, and Senate Republicans who once favored a pricing strategy, like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, have long since slunk away. Meanwhile, Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee have spent the last two weeks trying to derail Mr. Obama’s nominee to run the Environmental Protection Agency — a moderate named Gina McCarthy. Ms. McCarthy has served two Republican governors (Mitt Romney was one) but is considered suspect by the right wing because she wants to control carbon pollution, which is driving global temperatures upward.

Hence the need for executive action. Yet we are now four months into Mr. Obama’s second term, and there is no visible sign of a coherent strategy. … As this page has noted, it is possible to adopt a robust climate strategy based largely on executive actions. The most important of these is to invoke the E.P.A.’s authority under the Clean Air Act to limit pollution from stationary industrial sources, chiefly the power plants that account for almost 40 percent of the country’s carbon emissions. …

He can hasten the development of less-polluting alternatives to older-generation refrigerants and other chemicals. He can order the Energy Department to embark on a major program to improve the efficiency of appliances and commercial and residential buildings, which consume a huge chunk of the country’s energy supply. And he can ramp up investment in basic research.

All of this will take time, which is why it is important to get started.

Heatwave deaths in New York City could spike 22 percent in the next decade. [Guardian]

Elizabeth Kolbert on Keystone: “The pipeline isn’t inevitable, and it shouldn’t be treated as such. It’s just another step on the march to disaster.” [New Yorker]

Extreme drought stretching from Texas to Kansas and beyond could be here for longer than expected as aquifers dry up and groundwater disappears. [New York Times]

Deforestation continues to sweep across Southeast Asia. [Yale Environment 360]

On Friday, Rep. Lois Capps introduced legislation to create a national plan to assist medical professionals with health issues linked with climate change, allowing additional research and tracking of diseased and environmental health indicators. [The Hill]

Gas prices rose 11 cents over the last two weeks. [Time]

The Coast Guard is taking a look at why Shell’s Arctic drilling barge ran aground off an island in Alaska. [Washington Post]

One solution to “range anxiety” for electric cars could be a battery swapping system, which is something Tesla Motors appears to be examining. [Gas 2]

Iceland recently became the 100th nation to deploy wind power. [Renewable Energy Focus]

When future generations look back on the scandals of our age, it’ll be the unchecked rise in global temperatures, not the Benghazi talking points, that infuriate them.

Yes, unchecked warming is likely to prove the greatest scandal in U.S. history.

Certainly it’s the one that will ruin the lives of the most people, far more than Watergate did if our government doesn’t act to expose what’s going on and work to put an end to it — before it puts an end to our stable climate:

Scandalous: Projected warming this century (in red, via recent literature) if humanity allows current carbon pollution trends to continue compared to the temperature change over past 11,300 years (in blue, via Science, 2013).

I know it’s not one of the scandals the major media are now obsessed with 24/7, but that is business as usual for the MSM, as Klein notes:

Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it’s just bad luck. Sometimes it’s rank incompetence. Sometimes it’s criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global).

It was Watergate and the fame it brought Woodward and Bernstein that inspired so many journalists to enter the field. But now that post-modern cynicism reigns supreme –which is to say, much of the media acts as if their really is no objective truth or over-arching public interest — fame alone seems to drives the media.

And so this scandal goes largely unreported (see “Silence Of The Lambs 3: Media Coverage Of Climate Mixed In 2012, But Still Down Sharply From 2009“) or misreported (see “False Balance Lives“).

Fortunately for the media, having largely missed the chance to report the scandal when it might have had some positive impact on the outcome, they’ll have plenty of time to become famous reporting on its consequences (see Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).

Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen

On Wednesday night, Minnesota State Representative Glenn Gruenhagen (R-Glencoe) took to the House floor to talk about climate change and renewable energy.

Using sources such as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Gruenhagen told his colleagues that climate change is a “complete United Nations fraud and lie…. The latest facts from CPAC show that in the last sixteen years there’s been no global warming.”

While it is common practice among climate skeptics to claim that the Earth is no longer warming, the fact is global temperatures are rising. 2010 was the hottest year on record and every year of the 2000s was warmer than 1990s average. Over 30 million people were displaced by climate-related extreme weather events in 2012, and it is increasingly likely millions more will be displaced in the near future.

Watch the speech here, courtesy of theuptake.org:

Gruenhagen made his speech the same day a new survey of over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers found a 97 percent consensus that global warming is happening and humans are the cause and just a few days after it was reported that atmospheric C02 levels reached 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in human existence

Indeed, Minnesota residents are feeling the very real impacts of climate change. The MinnPost reports that three 1,000 year floods have occurred in the state in the last eight years as a result of shifts in rainfall patterns. Extreme drought is occurring not just in Minnesota but almost every state, and climate change is having cumulative stress on the Great Lakes. Rising levels of water vapor in the warming atmosphere are spiking heat indexes and associated health warnings.

Gruenhagen aside, the majority of lawmakers in Minnesota have recognized the importance of enacting policies to address climate change and in 2007, implemented one of the highest renewable energy standards in the nation – laws which require electric utilities companies to produce a portion of their electricity from wind, solar, and other renewable sources. Indeed, Minnesota ranks seventh in the nation in overall wind energy capacity and lawmakers in the state recently agreed to a solar energy standard.

At the federal level, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) recently attacked climate deniers on the Senate floor saying, “If 98 out of 100 doctors tell me I’ve got a problem, I should take their advice. And if those two other doctors get paid by Big Snack Food, like certain climate deniers get paid by Big Coal, I shouldn’t take their advice.”

China’s energy mix was 9.4 percent renewable as of 2011, and the Sichuan project is part of the country’s effort to boost itself to 15 percent by 2020. Hydroelectric power is anticipated to make up most of that increase.

The environmental ministry acknowledged that the project is massive enough to damage the local ecology, negatively effecting certain rare fish species and plant life. The dam’s developers have promised to try and offset those effects with “counter-measures,” and the project still requires the approval of China’s ruling cabinet.

To be built over 10 years by a subsidiary of state power firm Guodian Group, it is expected to cost 24.68 billion yuan ($4.02 billion) in investment.

The ministry, in a statement issued late on Tuesday, said an environmental impact assessment had acknowledged that the project would have a negative impact on rare fish and flora and affect protected local nature reserves.

Developers, it said, had pledged to take “counter-measures” to mitigate the effects.

Right now the title for China’s tallest dam goes to the Xiaowan project, at 292 meters, while the tallest dam in the world is currently Tajikistan’s Nurek dam, at 300 meters. The Sichuan dam will top 314 meters when all is said and done.

China has been at the forefront of hydroelectric development for a while now, with an enormous number of dams either constructed, in the works, or in the planning stages. Even individual projects can be of tremendous scale, providing in at least one instance an electrical capacity equal to nearly half of Britain’s entire national grid, and preventing 200 metric tons of carbon emissions each year. As of 2010, worldwide hydroelectric capacity was 850 to 900 gigawatts, meaning about one-fifth of the world’s electricity — and half the electricity for almost two thirds of the world’s countries — comes courtesy of hydropower. Though that use varies widely: the United States and Europe have developed 70 and 75 percent of their hydroelectric potential, while Africa has only taken advantage of 7 percent.

At the same time, the large bodies of water and massive landscape alterations that are part and parcel of large dam projects mean hydroelectricity can come with unusually significant downsides. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China’s Hubei province, for example, caused significant ecological damage, increased the risk of landslides, flooded a number of archeological and cultural sites, and displaced 1.3 million people. And the constricted water flow can hurt downstream populations that rely on the rivers for their fresh water supplies.

Meanwhile, climate change itself is also making hydropower less reliable, as altering weather patterns dry up some river flows, boost others, and generally make the future availability of water flows more difficult to predict.

One answer to those challenges could be small scale hydropower. Studies suggest there’s as much as 30 gigawatts of unused potential for such projects in the United States. These set-ups generally provide 10 kilowatts to 30 megawatts a piece, and don’t require damming rivers. (Or they can be built into already existing dams, the vast majority of which are not hydroelectric.) Unfortunately, regulatory red tape is in many ways the major hurdle to taking advantage of small scale hydro.

First, on Wednesday a study came out that found 97% consensus on human-caused global warming in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. It was by our friends at Skeptical Science, John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli.

Then on Thursday, President Obama tweeted the study to his 31,000,000 (!) followers:

So how does the ever-shrinking Washington Post report the story? With the headline, “Obama tweet gets Australian researcher 31.5 million followers on Twitter.” #FAIL

And just to be clear that the WashPost is in fact as confused and innumerate as their headline suggests, the story asserts:

That tweet, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, led 31,541,507 people to decide to follow Australian climate change researcher John Cook on Twitter.

The Herald didn’t, however, make such a transparently silly claim. Their headline read, “Obama gives Aussie researcher 31,541,507 reasons to celebrate.”

Ten seconds on the interwebs will reveal that Cook has 6,560 followers. But then we’ve suspected for a while that the Washington Post doesn’t employ any fact checkers. Nor does it have a single editor who understood enough about social media to realize instantly that the headline — and hence the story — must be wrong.

No wonder the MSM is collapsing in the face of the new media onslaught. Note: As of Saturday morning, the story is still uncorrected.

This afternoon, the Department of Energy approved the second application for a facility to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) worldwide. Today’s approval to export up to 1.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day goes to Freeport LNG Expansion, on Quintana Island in Texas, for 25 years. The approval process now moves to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commissions (FERC), so the company is not in the clear yet.

Several companies have received nearly two dozen permits from DoE to export LNG to countries with which the U.S. has a free trade agreement (FTA), but the approval process has been much slower for permits to export to non-FTA countries. 19 facilities that want to export LNG to non-FTA countries are still under review by the Energy Department — including a joint project between ExxonMobil and Qatar Petroleum.

The natural gas industry is booming in the United States, largely due to the practice of fracking, which opened up large parts of the country to extraction previously thought uneconomical to drill. Natural gas can be transported via pipeline across land, but when companies want to export the fuel overseas, they have to use ships. Since natural gas (mostly methane) in gas form would require a large ship to transport, it must be cooled and liquefied before it can be exported across an ocean.

In the last decade, companies built facilities to import natural gas because the U.S. expected lower production than what fracking actually allowed. Once the shale gas boom sharply increased domestic production, they have tried to turn those import terminals into export terminals. Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass terminal, the first facility to receive DoE approval to export to non-FTA countries, is one example of this.

The reason for the delay of such applications is due to opposition largely from the chemical industry, which fears that exports will lead to an increase in the price of natural gas (which it uses for industrial purposes), and those who care about carbon emissions and the environment, who point out that the U.S. still does not know the consequences that exports will have on carbon emissions.

Congressman Ed Markey, running for John Kerry’s old senate seat in Massachusetts, said today that “The Department of Energy still doesn’t even know what the impact of natural gas exports will be on domestic businesses and consumers, but they are approving more exports anyway.”

If the U.S. is increasing exports, it becomes even more critical to ensure that the natural gas obtained through hydraulic fracturing is as safe as possible, with zero fugitive emissions. Yesterday the Interior Department released draft fracking rules, and there are some easy ways (5 in fact) to make the rules adequately protect Americans and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is one thing to argue for weak safeguards to give Americans access to “cheap energy” — it is another to argue for weak rules that poison the air and water to export the energy to other countries.

The net climate effects of LNG exports depend largely on the energy currently used by the importing country — what the gas will replace. Coal-heavy economies that replace their coal with natural gas should see lower emissions, but this transition could threaten more valuable transitions to renewable energy.

The Energy Department said in today’s approval that “the exports proposed in this Application are likely to yield net economic benefits to the United States.” Left unsaid is the fact that the more fossil fuels left in the ground, the easier it is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which would benefit the economy in myriad ways.

Since last November’s Presidential election, immigration reform with a road map to citizenship for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the country has been gaining momentum. On April 16 the bipartisan Senate “Gang of 8″ introduced their immigration bill, and diverse groups such as organized labor, evangelical Christians, and business leaders have lent their support for reform.

Just last month, the board of the Sierra Club, the oldest environmental organization in the United States voted to add their voice to the movement, officially supporting immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship. In doing so they joined other well-known environmental leaders like Bill McKibben and Van Jones.

Immigration reform and environmental protection are progressive issues that are in alignment, as the Sierra Club’s support illustrates: immigrants are affected by climate change and care about the environment, and the environmental movement is in turn strengthened by the inclusion of immigrant voices.

Here are the top five things you need to know about immigrants and the environment:

1. Immigrants are already a part of the environmental movement. Immigrants and people of color have long been key players in the environmental justice movement, which has been fighting back against environmental injustice that has disproportionately affected communities of color and low-income communities. Environmental justice organizations, for example, often speak out against polluting and toxic businesses, like power plants and fuel tank facilities that are sited in or near communities of color. But while immigrants have been active in the more localized environmental justice movement, they need to have a larger role in the overall environmental movement which has all too often been criticized for a lack of diversity. In a recent Grist post, One America board member Sudha Nandagopal wrote, “… we don’t just need to add diverse faces to the crowds at environmental protests. We need inclusive strategies and a diversity of ideas. Communities of color must be equitable partners in identifying problems, crafting solutions, and pushing for change.”
2. Immigrants have a big stake in the health of the planet. Historically, immigrants and people of color have borne a greater share of environmental burdens in their communities and at their jobs. According to the Sierra Club, 43 percent of Latino voters either live or work near a toxic site (such as a power plant, refinery, highway or factory.) This figure has increased by close to 10 percent since 2008, showing a dangerous uptick in the number of Latinos potentially exposed to dangerous environmental conditions, and the need among this community for a cleaner, healthier planet.
3. Immigrants tend to lead low-carbon lifestyles. More than half of all immigrants live in large metropolitan areas, which have some of the lowest per capita emissions in the U.S. In fact, CAP analysis has found that cities with the lowest carbon footprint had an average immigrant population of 26 percent, while the 10 highest per-capita carbon emitting cities have an average immigrant population below 5 percent. In addition to living in big cities, immigrants are almost three times more likely to take public transportation and nearly two times more likely to carpool than native-born residents.
4. Immigrants are helping to drive the green economy. Immigrants are leading new businesses in the green and high-tech industries, having launched 40 percent of publicly traded, venture-backed companies and nearly half of private, venture-backed startups. Additionally, immigrants occupy many “green-collar” jobs (blue-collar jobs in the green goods and services industry) and use their skills to advance energy efficiency, clean energy and sustainability. Green-collar employment includes jobs in wind turbine manufacturing, solar power project construction, home weatherization, solar panel installation, etc.
5. Immigrants support environmental policies. A recent poll found that 7 out of 10 Latino voters support environmental protections while 9 out of 10 feel a sense of “moral responsibility” when it comes to protecting the environment. A similar study of Asian American voters in California found that 3 out of 4 are extremely or very concerned about environmental issues, and 7 out of 10 believe that environmental regulations “provide an important benefit to society and protect health, air and water.” Immigrants from Latin American and Asian countries represent more than 60 percent (over 24 million residents) of the U.S. foreign-born population and these polls indicate that they can be strong advocates for environmental protections.

In coming out in support of immigration reform, Sierra Club President Allison Chin stated, “By establishing an equitable path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in America today, we can empower those in our society who are most vulnerable to toxic pollution to fully participate in our democracy, fight back against polluters and demand public health protections and clean energy solutions.” The intersection of environmentalism and immigration reform will continue to benefit and strengthen both movements.

Dave Roberts at Grist is (eternally) puzzled that folks don’t seem to know that. Since eternity is a very long time — only slightly longer than the lifetime of some CO2 molecules in the air — I’ll repost his key points:

1. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in Mass v. EPA that CO2 qualifies as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
2. In 2009, EPA issued an endangerment finding that deemed CO2 a threat to public health. Once those two things happened, a cascading series of of legal obligations was set into motion.
3. First, EPA must regulate “mobile sources” of CO2 under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act. That’s what it did with its new auto mileage standards.
4. Then, EPA must regulate “stationary sources” of CO2 underSection 111 of the Clean Air Act. First it will issue standards on new power plants. It issued a draft regulation last year, but it missed a deadline in April for issuing the final rule (for which some green groups are suing it). Supposedly it has delayed release of the final regulation so it can do more work to protect the rule against legal challenge.
5. Then, EPA must regulate existing stationary sources — in the case of CO2, primarily power plants — under Section 111(d). That rule, the 111(d) rule, is the one EPA keeps telling journalists it has “no current plans” to develop, and no surprise, since it’s got its hands full working on the rule for new power plants.

That is from Roberts’ post, “Once more, with feeling: EPA is required to regulate carbon from existing power plants.”

Roberts opines:

Again, this series of executive actions is prescribed by statute. EPA is not “bypassing” Congress, or going around it, or in any way exceeding its authority. It is not even acting on Obama’s discretion, not really. It is simply carrying out the will of Congress, as embodied in the Clean Air Act….

The Savvy Washington Insiders of the political press don’t understand or care about policy, they only care about court intrigue, so they are suckers for the daft conservative narrative that EPA regulation of carbon is some quasi-dictatorial power grab that Obama is contemplating. Now, as usual, they’re busy being amateur Sun Tzus and gaming out whether and how he will screw enviros over.

Who knows, maybe enviros — and the planet — will get screwed in the end. It’s usually a safe bet in D.C. But whatever happens, rules on carbon from power plants are coming. On that, Obama has no choice.

So again, EPA is required to regulate carbon from existing power plants. Or, rather, EPA is required to regulate carbon from existing power plants!!!

(Credit: NY Times)

Gina McCarthy finally got a vote.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing yesterday to vote on McCarthy’s nomination to be the next EPA Administrator. This came after a week of obstruction from the Republican members of the committee, who boycotted the scheduled vote last week.

As one of the most highly-qualified nominees to lead the Environmental Protection Agency in its history, McCarthy has understandably won plaudits from Republicans like Senator James Inhofe and energy industry titans like American Electric Power. She has been dubbed the “green quarterback” in President Obama’s administration as well as former Governor Mitt Romney’s. Indeed, McCarthy was approved by the full Senate in 2009 for her current position leading the Office of Air and Radiation by a voice vote.

Carol Browner, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, expressed hope that McCarthy would receive a similar vote before the full Senate:

I commend the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works for approving the nomination of Gina McCarthy. Not only is she a seasoned civil servant with decades of experience, she is clearly a bipartisan nominee, having worked as an environmental adviser for both Republican and Democratic governors. The Senate already confirmed her once for her current role at the EPA, and I hope they move forward expeditiously with her current confirmation so that she can continue her lifelong work of protecting children and families from air pollution and other hazards.

The ranking member of the committee, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), outlined five “requests” prior to last week’s scheduled vote, and cited dissatisfaction with EPA’s responsiveness to those five requests as the reason all committee Republicans boycotted last week’s vote. These five questions mainly involve transparency issues: two have been fully satisfied and are moot at this point. In fact, each have been answered, and the reasonable requests fulfilled.

What are the points of contention? The only things EPA will likely not do is:

• release the full data behind air pollution studies that reveal personal medical information — EPA has released the rest of the data
• adopt an industry-backed “cost-benefit” analysis for its regulations in place of several comprehensive cost-benefit analyses that take environmental and health factors into account
• give corporations and industry parties the right to join all EPA settlement talks in lawsuits against the agency for violating the law as “intervenors,” allowing industries that pollute illegally sit in on talks about the response to their own illegal activities

Requests to do any of these things are far beyond the scope of a confirmation vote. EPA and Gina McCarthy have acquiesced to all reasonable demands from Senate Republicans. Vitter essentially said so during yesterday’s hearing:

Our key focus has been these five key transparency requests … The good news is that as of last night there has been meaningful progress in terms of our five key transparency requests and that’s why we’re here today, to recognize that progress and to urge additional progress.

In response to the progress made as of last night, I’m sending a letter today to the acting administrator Bob Perciasepe and to Gina McCarthy. And I just want to read relevant parts of the letter. ‘Dear Acting Administrator Perciasepe and Assistant Administrator McCarthy … Because these steps forward were significant, we want to thank you and acknowledge progress including by moving forward with the committee markup of Gina’s nomination…. Should major additional progress be made in all of the five categories over the next two weeks, I will strongly support handling the McCarthy nomination on the senate floor without a cloture vote or any 60 vote threshold. Should all of our requests in the five categories be granted, I will support the McCarthy nomination.

Given that McCarthy and EPA have complied with all reasonable demands, Vitter’s own words would suggest that Gina McCarthy deserves an up-or-down vote without obstruction. Her qualifications, experience, and poise certainly suggest she deserves unanimous approval. The importance of the work that lies ahead of the EPA in the next four years demand a strong, qualified leader like Gina McCarthy.

Ernest Moniz, a former MIT physicist, is the new secretary of energy. The Senate voted to confirm Moniz this afternoon by a vote of 97 to 0.

Moniz now takes over for Steven Chu, who left the Department of Energy in April after a tumultuous tenure in office. Faced with the sequester and a possible continuing resolution that would limit the department’s budget, Moniz will also need to make hard decisions about what programs to fund.

As a moderate progressive on energy issues, Moniz had strong bipartisan support — unlike many of President Obama’s other nominees. However, some environmental groups publicly worried about Moniz because of his support for an “all-of-the-above” strategy to energy production, particularly his promotion of natural gas while at MIT…. Moniz has also been a strong supporter of renewable energy and the need to address climate change.

The Interior Department issued new draft rules on fracking, weaker than a previous version supported by many, and stronger than the “no federal regulations” position advocated for by industry. [Washington Post]

In an extended road trip around the country, a researcher has found that methane emission levels are much higher than previously thought. [Yale Environment 360]

Unfortunately, a climate denier talking point that increasing clouds will cool the earth is even less true than once originally thought. [Climate News Network]

Gina McCarthy’s nomination to head the EPA was voted out of the Senate EPW Committee on party lines, and faces a meeting with Senator Blunt over a levee issue in his state, more requests by Senator Vitter, and finally a vote on the Senate floor. [The Hill]

EPA is the most effective agency in the Office of Management and Budget’s cost-benefit analysis. [Sustainable Business]

The hacker group Anonymous launches Operation Petrol, against the fossil fuel industry. [The Hill]

President Obama travels to Baltimore today on a jobs and opportunity tour, and will visit a company whose president testified on behalf of the Keystone XL pipeline. [Buzzfeed]

Solar power windows could be in the marketplace very soon. [CleanTechnica]

2012′s spring was the earliest on record. [Capital Weather Gang]

Epic drought in Texas has impacted the state’s turkey hunt, and if conditions remain the same, hunters could see less than half of the usual numbers. [Daily Climate]

10 reasons Canada should rethink oil sands development, courtesy of a new website: oilsandsrealitycheck.org. [Oil Sands Reality Check, DeSmogBlog]

The UK rejected a proposal to define tar sands oil as “highly polluting,” signaling that it supports EU imports of the carbon-intensive fuel. [Guardian]

The USGS explains, “The new study builds upon a previous USGS snowpack investigation which showed that, until the 1980s, the northern Rocky Mountains experienced large snowpacks when the central and southern Rockies experienced meager ones, and vice versa. Yet, since the 1980s, there have been simultaneous snowpack declines along the entire length of the Rocky Mountains, and unusually severe declines in the north.”

We reported on that previous work in 2011 — see “USGS: Global Warming Drives Rockies Snowpack Loss Unrivaled in 800 Years, Threatens Western Water Supply.” The USGS explained back then:

The warming and snowpack decline are projected to worsen through the 21st century, foreshadowing a strain on water supplies. Runoff from winter snowpack – layers of snow that accumulate at high altitude – accounts for 60 to 80 percent of the annual water supply for more than 70 million people living in the western United States.

What’s most worrisome is that we now have three major trends driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases that threaten to significantly worsen drought and water problems in the West and Southwest:

1. Less precipitation in many areas (see here)
2. Less snowpack, as the USGS studies have found
3. Hotter temperatures (see “We’re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temperatures — Imagine What’ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming“).

Assuming the anti-science crowd continue to block any serious action, these catastrophic changes will last a long, long time (see NOAA: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).

For the record, it was the possibility of losing the Sierra snowpack in the second half of the century that led then Energy Secretary Chu to warn in 2009, “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”

Geophysical Research Letters published the new research, “Regional patterns and proximal causes of the recent snowpack decline in the Rocky Mountains” (subs. req’d). Here are the key points from the USGS news release:

The new study has teased apart and quantified the different influences of winter temperature, spring temperature, and precipitation on historic snowpack variations and trends in the region. To distinguish those varying influences, the researchers implemented a regional snow model that uses inputs of monthly temperature and precipitation data from 1895 to 2011.

“Each year we looked at temperature and precipitation variations and the amount of water contained within the snowpack as of April,” said USGS scientist Greg Pederson, the lead author of the study. “Snow deficits were consistent throughout the Rockies due to the lack of precipitation during the cool seasons during the 1930s – coinciding with the Dust Bowl era.  From 1980 on, warmer spring temperatures melted snowpack throughout the Rockies early, regardless of winter precipitation. The model in turn shows temperature as the major driving factor in snowpack declines over the past thirty years.”

… The timing of snowmelt affects not only when water is available for crop irrigation and energy production from hydroelectric dams, but also the risk of regional floods and wildfires. Earlier and faster snowmelt could have repercussions for water supply, risk management, and ecosystem health in western watersheds.

… [Greg] McCabe, co-author of the study, explains that “recent springtime warming also reduced the extent of snow cover at low to middle elevations where temperature has had the greatest impact.”

What’s particularly worrisome is that we’ve seen these dramatic and harmful changes already — and we’ve only warmed about a degree and a half Fahrenheit in the past century.  The problem for our children and grandchildren is that if we continue anywhere near our current greenhouse gas emissions pathway, we are on track to warm five times times that or more this century (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

Another 2011 study, “The Last Drop: Climate Change and the Southwest Water Crisis,” found that drought and reduced precipitation in the U.S. SW alone could cost up to $1 trillion by century’s end.

The time to act was a long time ago, but now is still better than later.

(Credit: Philippe Lissac / GODONG)

Conservative states, business groups, fossil fuel companies, and politicians who deny the science of climate change are petitioning the Supreme Court to reverse Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations on greenhouse gases and to weaken the Clean Air Act. This would involve the Court either limiting or reversing its own 2007 decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, which found that the EPA is required to regulate carbon pollution as pollution.

Reuters reported that the Court’s decision of whether or not to take up the petitioners’ case will have a significant impact on future efforts to reduce carbon emissions. The appeals to the Supreme Court follow the DC Circuit Court of Appeals’ refusal to reconsider the matter. The Court is expected to decide whether to hear the petitions in October.

The nine petitions, filed over the last few months, seek review of EPA regulations. Petitioners include: states with fossil fuel-friendly governors like Texas, Alaska, and Virginia; industry groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Association of Manufacturers; as well as fossil fuel companies like Peabody Energy (the world’s largest private-sector coal company). The petition led by Texas includes as fellow petitioners Gov.Rick Perry (R), Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R), and Reps. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), who deny the reality of climate science.

Since the Court ruled that CO2 is a pollutant, the EPA found that it was a threat to public health through an endangerment finding:

“Pursuant to CAA section 202(a), the Administrator finds that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated both to endanger public health and to endanger public welfare.”

In August of 2012, EPA implemented new mileage standards in order to regulate vehicles, and is expected to do the same with stationary sources — primarily power plants. These standards are already reaping benefits for drivers and manufacturers through increased efficiency, lower emissions, and wider inventory selection. Reducing carbon pollution emitted by power plants would slow the dangerous acceleration of climate change, improve air quality, and would be a net economic positive by avoiding “negative health and environmental effects.”

The wide range of petitions present an unusual number of options for the Supreme Court to rein in or overturn Massachusetts v. EPA (there were 5 petitions challenging the Affordable Care Act in 2011). The Court is more likely to take up one of the petitions on narrower grounds, as most experts see broad action as unlikely.

They represented a range of groups from all fifty states, as well as Puerto Rico, all organized under the “50 States United For Healthy Air” campaign. They spoke this week with elected officials to call for several needed changes:

1) Finalize new carbon limits for new power plants, and establish limits for existing power plants. The regulations for new plants are in the works, driven by a Supreme Court ruling that the executive branch has the power and legal obligation to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. The Obama Administration hasn’t decided yet what to do about emissions from already existing plants, but the National Resources Defense Council recently came up with an impressive proposal. And this can all be done without the need for legislative approval from Congress.

As the “50 States United For Healthy Air” campaign notes, the rising temperatures driven by climate change intensify the damaging health effects of smog and other pollutants. On top of that, climate change can alter the spread of diseases and increase deaths due to heat waves, and all these effects fall harder on poorer and more vulnerable populations.

2) Finalize federally enforceable coal ash rules. Coal ash is created whenever coal is burned, and generators often then dump the toxic residue in landfills — which have given way on more than one occasion, leading to spills that are hazardous to both the environment and human health. Meanwhile, the EPA’s regulations of coal ash have been stuck in limbo for years.

3) Strengthen standards limiting air pollution and smog. Along with carbon dioxide, the burning of fossil fuels emits all sorts of other pollution into the air we breath, driving up rates of asthma, heart and lung disease, hospital visits and premature deaths. Again, these harms fall hardest on children, the old, the poor, and minorities.

Estimates of new EPA rules to crack down on these pollutants suggest the limits could prevent 21,600 premature deaths, 12,540 hospitalizations, 199,000 asthma cases each year. The rules include standards for power plants and industrial emitters, as well as the still-being -developed “Tier 3″ standards for motor vehicles. But again, the rules are still awaiting finalization.

“50 States United For Healthy Air” includes representatives from the American Nurses Association, Earthjustice, the Hip Hop Caucus, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Council of Churches, the National Latino Coalition on Climate Change, and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

It has been a year since the BLM took its first stab at this task — and fell short of what is required. As CAP’s chair and counselor John Podesta said on May 4, 2012, about that effort:

Natural gas is a key component to establishing a clean energy future in the United States, but the public must be confident that it is done safely and responsibly, and the proposed rule released today by the Department of the Interior misses the mark.

The federal rules governing the controversial well stimulation technique commonly called fracking — which haven’t been updated since 1988 — should be a model of thorough, transparent and workable government oversight.

Most of the lands where they will be applied belong to all Americans, a birthright that we hold in trust for generations to come. That alone requires the Interior Department and the Obama administration to not cut corners in deference to the oil and gas industry. Unfortunately there are numerous indications that, as Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) said last week, “The Interior Department seems to be making the rule weaker, not stronger.”

The tests that the new rules should meet include the following:

• Maximum transparency. Chemicals used in fracking must be disclosed to the public to the greatest extent possible. While it is common in states that require disclosure to allow exemptions for trade secrets held by individual companies, this exception has in some cases been stretched to become a loophole. In the new federal rules there should be thorough oversight so that only truly legitimate trade secrets are protected. And even real trade secret information should be disclosed to regulators and medical professionals who may have to respond to health emergencies.
• Disclosure through a government website. The public must have access to full information on where fracking is occurring, and what substances are being used, through a government-run website, not one that is industry supported. The FracFocus website managed by an Oklahoma non-profit with industry ties has numerous flaws. It doesn’t collect and publish some of the information that individual states require be disclosed, and it is very difficult for users of the site to aggregate and analyze information.
• Disclosure before drilling. The public must know before drilling begins, and not only after it is completed, what chemicals are being injected underground. Early disclosure will allow the public and nearby private landowners to assess risks to their health and to document conditions that exist before drilling begins so they can make comparisons if accidents or spills occur.
• Baseline and post-drilling water testing. The Department of the Interior should require that nearby water supplies be tested both before and after drilling.
• State of the art well construction standards. Protection of underground water supplies cannot be guaranteed without application of the highest possible industry standards for well integrity and testing of cement casings.

With the unveiling of the new rules on fracking on public lands the Interior Department under new Secretary Sally Jewell — and the Obama administration as a whole — will be laying down an important marker about how they will manage fossil fuel development on the public’s lands.

Other tests lie ahead. They include whether the administration can build on the progress made during the first term in reforming oil and gas leasing so the program does a better job of cohesive planning over large landscapes and of avoiding conflicts with other resources and uses such as recreation and municipal watersheds. The administration should also make good on its promise to raise decades-old royalty rates paid by oil and gas companies, should adopt a clean resources standard for public lands to re-direct energy development more towards clean energy, and should take into account climate change impacts when doing environmental reviews of energy projects.

Finally, an administration which has been aggressive about increasing fossil fuel production from federal lands should be equally aggressive about conserving public lands that have great value for things other than commercial development. As we have shown in the past, the administration’s record in that regard is insufficient, and lags far behind some of its recent predecessors.

“I don’t know whether it’s [sequester] going to hurt the economy or not. I don’t think anyone quite understands how the sequester is really going to work.” – John Boehner, 3/3/13

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) claims he did not know whether the automatic budget cuts (or sequester) imposed by the Budget Control Act would hurt Americans, but he must not have been paying attention. In February, the Center for American Progress predicted that “Sequester Will Expose Americans to Greater Health Risks and Other Perils.”

Ten weeks after the budget sequester took effect on March 1, the House Appropriations Committee Democrats released “Report on Sequestration Effects and Efforts to Mitigate its Impact.” This brand new analysis confirms many of our predictions that the sequester cuts threaten Americans’ health, safety and well-being.

The sequester cuts in energy and environment related programs generally have had the following impacts so far:

• Less ability to fight wildfires
• Greater exposure to climate related extreme weather
• Less protection from air pollution
• Reduced protection for national parks and other protected places

Climate Progress Deputy Editor Ryan Koronowski described the impact of budget cuts on our ability to fight wildfires this summer in what many experts believe will be quite a vicious fire season.

The sequester will expose Americans to additional risks from climate change. The House Appropriations Committee Democrats report that

The sequester will result in a cut of at least $50 million from NOAA’s geostationary weather satellite program, which provides continuous monitoring to track severe weather. The cut will cause a 3-6 month satellite launch delay, increasing the likelihood of having fewer than two operational geostationary weather satellites in the 2017 timeframe, increasing the risk of inaccurate forecasts for hurricanes, tornadoes, and severe thunderstorms, with further risks to public safety and costs from weather-related damage.

In addition, NASA’s science budget cuts will affect “climate research satellites.”

These cuts follow two years when the 25 most severe climate related floods, drought, storms, heat waves, and wildfires took 1,107 lives and caused $188 billion in damages. A CAP analysis estimated that taxpayers spent a total of $136 billion on relief and recovery for these and other disasters that occurred in 2011-2012 — about $400 per home per year. The reduction in weather forecasting and climate research will hamper our ability to warn vulnerable communities about future extreme weather events, increasing their risk.

The House report also found that the Environmental Protection Agency will have less ability to protect people from air pollution.

EPA plans to delay the implementation of monitoring sites for dangerous air pollutants and cut grants to State regulators. The result will be reduced enforcement of air pollution rules, potentially overturning years of public health benefits from increasing air pollution.

For instance, this will reduce the number of “off-road monitors” that measure levels of smog-forming chemicals. In addition, cuts will make it more difficult for state agencies to enforce restrictions on pollution, according to the National Association of Clean Air Agencies.

Federal enforcement of environmental safeguards is also impaired. Doug Parker, the director of EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) warned that:

There are areas where there were boots on the ground where there are no longer boots on the ground…. There are significant geographic regions we can no longer cover.

Polluters know that if there are fewer cops on the beat then they can emit more toxic and other harmful pollutants with less risk of discovery.

As Climate Progress has repeatedly noted, it is imperative that we speed the conversion from fossil fuels to efficiency and renewable energy. But we will continue to rely on oil and natural gas to fuel our transportation and electricity, respectively, while this transition is underway. It is to our economic and security benefit to produce these fuels here, including from public lands and waters set aside for that purpose (though not through allowing drilling in currently protected places). Yet the House report determined that the U.S. will produce less domestic fuel due to the sequester.

The Bureau of Land Management is forced to slow down approval of oil and gas drilling permits and cancel lease sales to meet the spending reductions required by the sequester. 300 to 400 fewer drilling permits will be processed, 150 fewer leases issued, and two lease sales cancelled this year, all as a direct result of the sequester. There will be an estimated $150 million in revenue losses to the States and U.S. Treasury because of these reduced lease sales and drilling permits.

The sequester will also curtail Americans ability to hunt, fish, hike, boat, and otherwise enjoy our millions of acres of wild places. The House report found that:

The public should be prepared for reduced hours and services this year at our nation’s 401 national parks, 155 national forests, 561 national wildlife refuges, and more than 258 public land units. For the National Park Service alone, the sequester means that 900 permanent positions are being left unfilled and 1000 fewer seasonal workers are being hired this year.

Fewer employees means fewer staff at visitor centers, and less interpretive talks and campfire programs that the public has come to expect when they visit these special wild places.

These are just some of the risks posed by this meat ax approach to cutting government spending at a time when the federal budget deficit is already shrinking. Americans can’t afford more of this untargeted austerity.

That was the message delivered by a group of business leaders who visited Washington, D.C. this week to tell their elected officials that protected public lands like national parks, national monuments, and wildness areas are key to attracting talent and maintaining their bottom line.  As Jeff Welch, the co-founder and president of Bozeman, Montana-based communications and advertising firm MercuryCSC put it:

The outdoors for us in our region is a big competitive advantage, it helps us recruit people from all over the country, even other places in the world to come to Montana.  It’s really the only thing we have as a competitive advantage in a place like Bozeman.

And the president of software company Foundant Technologies, also located in Bozeman, echoed this sentiment:

We use the outdoors as a competitive advantage to attract and retain employees.  And so the outdoors and access to public lands and preservation of public lands are really critical to our business.

These anecdotes are supported by growing research about the economic value of public lands.  For example, a report from economic consulting firm Headwaters Economics found that the American West’s protected public lands help to create a high quality of life in the region, which draws both entrepreneurs and their employees.  This is one reason that the region has seen more employment growth over the last 40 years compared to the United States overall (graph below). Other growth indicators such as population and personal income have also increased more in the West than in the rest of the country.

The report from Headwaters Economics also discusses how the economy of the West is changing.  Whereas it once was based on resource extraction, it is diversifying to be more knowledge-based with industries like technology and health care.  As the group writes, “This western job growth was almost entirely in services industries such as health care, real estate, high-tech, and finance and insurance, which created 19.3 million net new jobs, many of them high-paying.”

The business leaders’ trip to Washington comes at an important time for public lands policy.  Sally Jewell, the former chief executive of outdoor company REI, was confirmed as the Secretary of the Interior last month.  She will have a number of important decisions on her plate regarding public lands, from new rules about drilling and hydraulic fracturing to protecting landscapes that local communities want to see set aside for future generations.

And she will also have the challenge of better balancing energy development and conservation on public lands considering that during the first term of the Obama administration, 6.3 million acres of public lands were leased to oil and gas companies while only 2.6 million acres were permanently protected.

(Credit: TANAKA Juuyoh/Flickr)

For more than 30 years, ocean fish and mammals have migrated away from warming equatorial waters and toward the poles, providing more evidence climate change has already had broad global consequences. [Washington Post]

Fish and other sea life have been heading toward the Earth’s poles for more than three decades, a mass migration to cooler waters that provides more evidence of a rapidly warming planet and has repercussions for fish harvests around the globe, according to a first-of-its-kind study released Wednesday.

The study, in the journal Nature, found that significant numbers of 968 species of fish and invertebrates examined by University of British Columbia researchers moved to escape the warming waters of their original habitats. Previous studies had demonstrated the same phenomenon for specific places in the world’s oceans. The authors said their research is the first to assess the migration worldwide and to look back as far as 1970.

The research is more confirmation that “global change is real and has been real for a long time. It’s not something in the distant future. It is well underway,” said Boris Worm, a professor of marine biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who was not part of the study.

EPA nominee Gina McCarthy should get a real vote in the Environment and Public Works Committee today at noon, while Energy Secretary nominee Ernest Moniz is set to get a vote on the Senate floor. [The Hill]

George Bush’s EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman said that GOP members of the EPW Committee “looked like sore losers” when they boycotted McCarthy’s vote hearing last week. [National Journal]

A new study confirms broad, 97.1% consensus among peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals that humans activity causes global warming. [Guardian, Reuters, ThinkProgress]

The U.S. military’s programmatic efforts to rely less on fossil fuels are threatened by the sequester. [Medill]

BP wants British Prime Minister David Cameron to intervene regarding the compensation of businesses affected by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill. [BBC]

The GAO finds that the federal government should help local communities adapt to the impacts of climate change. [The Hill]

The 5th Circuit ruled against a lawsuit filed by Mississippi coastal residents arguing that fossil fuel emissions contributed to the strength of Hurricane Katrina. [Clarion Ledger]

Organizing for Action called on supporters to press the Republican EPW members for boycotting McCarthy’s nomination hearing. [The Hill]

Weather prediction is slated to improve significantly following upgrades to the two supercomputers the National Weather Service uses to forecast local, national, and global weather patterns. [Washington Post]

Spoiled food could be used to power grocery stores using clean electricity. [LA Times]

A new survey of over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers by our citizen science team at Skeptical Science has found a 97 percent consensus in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are causing global warming.

Lead author John Cook created a short video abstract summarizing the study.

The Abstracts Survey

The first step of our approach involved expanding the original survey of the peer-reviewed scientific literature in Oreskes (2004). We performed a keyword search of peer-reviewed scientific journal publications (in the ISI Web of Science) for the terms ‘global warming’ and ‘global climate change’ between the years 1991 and 2011, which returned over 12,000 papers. John Cook created a web-based system that would randomly display a paper’s abstract (summary). We agreed upon definitions of possible categories: explicit or implicit endorsement of human-caused global warming, no position, and implicit or explicit rejection (or minimization of the human influence).

Our approach was also similar to that taken by James Powell, as illustrated in the popular graphic below. Powell examined nearly 14,000 abstracts, searching for explicit rejections of human-caused global warming, finding only 24. We took this approach further, also looking at implicit rejections, no opinions, and implicit/explicit endorsements.

We took a conservative approach in our ratings. For example, a study which takes it for granted that global warming will continue for the foreseeable future could easily be put into the implicit endorsement category; there is no reason to expect global warming to continue indefinitely unless humans are causing it. However, unless an abstract included (either implicit or explicit) language about the cause of the warming, we categorized it as ‘no position’.

Note that John Cook also initiated a spinoff from the project with a survey of climate blog participants re-rating a subset of these same abstracts. However, this spinoff is not a part of our research or conclusions.

The Team

A team of Skeptical Science volunteers proceeded to categorize the 12,000 abstracts — the most comprehensive survey of its kind to date. Each paper was rated independently at least twice, with the identity of the other co-rater not known. A dozen team members completed most of the 24,000+ ratings. There was no funding provided for this project; all the work was performed on a purely voluntary basis.

Once we finished the 24,000+ ratings, we went back and checked the abstracts where there were disagreements. If the disagreement about a given paper couldn’t be settled by the two initial raters, a third person acted as the tie-breaker.

The volunteers were an internationally diverse group. Team members’ home countries included Australia, USA, Canada, UK, New Zealand, Germany, Finland, and Italy.

The Self-Ratings

As an independent test of the measured consensus, we also emailed over 8,500 authors and asked them to rate their own papers using our same categories. The most appropriate expert to rate the level of endorsement of a published paper is the author of the paper, after all. We received responses from 1,200 scientists who rated a total of over 2,100 papers. Unlike our team’s ratings that only considered the summary of each paper presented in the abstract, the scientists considered the entire paper in the self-ratings.

The 97% Consensus Results

Based on our abstract ratings, we found that just over 4,000 papers expressed a position on the cause of global warming, 97.1% of which endorsed human-caused global warming. In the self-ratings, nearly 1,400 papers were rated as taking a position, 97.2% of which endorsed human-caused global warming.

We found that about two-thirds of papers didn’t express a position on the subject in the abstract, which confirms that we were conservative in our initial abstract ratings. This result isn’t surprising for two reasons: 1) most journals have strict word limits for their abstracts, and 2) frankly, every scientist doing climate research knows humans are causing global warming. There’s no longer a need to state something so obvious. For example, would you expect every geological paper to note in its abstract that the Earth is a spherical body that orbits the sun?

This result was also predicted by Oreskes (2007), which noted that scientists

“… generally focus their discussions on questions that are still disputed or unanswered rather than on matters about which everyone agrees”

However, according to the author self-ratings, nearly two-thirds of the papers in our survey do express a position on the subject somewhere in the paper.

We also found that the consensus has strengthened gradually over time. The slow rate reflects that there has been little room to grow, because the consensus on human-caused global warming has generally always been over 90% since 1991. Nevertheless, in both the abstract ratings and self-ratings, we found that the consensus has grown to about 98% as of 2011.

Percentage of papers endorsing the consensus among only papers that express a position endorsing or rejecting the consensus. From Cook et al. (2013).

Our results are also consistent with previous research finding a 97 percent consensus amongst climate experts on the human cause of global warming. Doran and Zimmerman (2009) surveyed Earth scientists, and found that of the 77 scientists responding to their survey who are actively publishing climate science research, 75 (97.4%) agreed that “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.” Anderegg et al. (2010) compiled a list of 908 researchers with at least 20 peer-reviewed climate publications. They found that:

“≈97% of self-identified actively publishing climate scientists agree with the tenets of ACC [anthropogenic climate change]“

In our survey, among scientists who expressed a position on AGW in their abstract, 98.4% endorsed the consensus. This is greater than 97% consensus of peer-reviewed papers because endorsement papers had more authors than rejection papers, on average. Thus there is a 97.1% consensus in the peer-reviewed literature, and a 98.4% consensus amongst scientists researching climate change.

Why is this Important?

Several studies have shown that people who correctly perceive the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming are more likely to support government action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. This was most recently shown in McCright et al. (2013), recently published in the journal Climatic Change. People will defer to the judgment of experts, and they trust climate scientists on the subject of global warming.

However, research has also shown that the public is misinformed on the climate consensus. For example, a 2012 poll from US Pew Research Center found less than half of Americans thought that scientists agreed that humans were causing global warming. One contributor to this misperception is false balance in the media, particularly in the US, where most climate stories are “balanced” with a “skeptic” perspective. However, this results in making the 3 percent seem much larger, like 50 percent. In trying to achieve “balance”, the media has actually created a very unbalanced perception of reality. As a result, people believe scientists are still split about what’s causing global warming, and therefore there is not nearly enough public support or motivation to solve the problem.\

Such false balance has long been the goal of a dedicated misinformation campaign waged by the fossil fuel industry. Just as one example, in 1991 Western Fuels Association conducted a $510,000 campaign whose primary goal was to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).” These vested interests have exploited the media desire to appear “balanced.”

Open Access for Maximum Transparency

We chose to submit our paper to Environmental Research Letters because it is a well-respected, high-impact journal, but also because it offers the option of making a paper available by open access, meaning that for an up-front fee, the paper can be made free for anybody to download. This was important to us, because we want our results to be as accessible and transparent as possible.

To pay the open access fee, in keeping with the citizen science approach, we asked for donations from Skeptical Science readers. We received over 50 donations in less than 10 hours to fully crowd-fund the $1,600 open access cost.

Human-Caused Global Warming

We fully anticipate that some climate contrarians will respond by saying “we don’t dispute that humans cause some global warming.” First of all, there are a lot of people who do dispute that there is a consensus that humans cause any global warming. Our paper shows that their position is not supported in the scientific literature.

Second, we did look for papers that quantify the human contribution to global warming, and most are not that specific. However, as noted above, if a paper minimized the human contribution, we classified that as a rejection. For example, if a paper were to say “the sun caused most of the global warming over the past century,” that would be included in the less than 3% of papers in the rejection categories.

Many studies simply defer to the expert summary of climate science research put together by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which states that most of the global warming since the mid-20th century has been caused by humans. According to recent research, that statement is actually too conservative.

Of the papers that specifically examine the human and natural causes of global warming, virtually all conclude that humans are the dominant cause over the past 50 to 100 years.

Net human and natural percent contributions to the observed global surface warming over the past 50-65 years according to Tett et al. 2000 (T00, dark blue), Meehl et al. 2004 (M04, red), Stone et al. 2007 (S07, light green), Lean and Rind 2008 (LR08, purple), Huber and Knutti 2011 (HK11, light blue), Gillett et al. 2012 (G12, orange), Wigley and Santer 2012 (WS12, dark green), and Jones et al. 2013 (J12, pink).

Most studies simply accept this fact and go on to examine the consequences of this human-caused global warming and associated climate change.

Another important point is that once you accept that humans are causing global warming, you must also accept that global warming is still happening; humans cause global warming by increasing the greenhouse effect, and our greenhouse gas emissions just keep accelerating. This ties in to our previous posts noting that global warming is accelerating; but that over the past decade, most of that warming has gone into the oceans (including the oft-neglected deep oceans). If you accept that humans are causing global warming, as over 97% of peer-reviewed scientific papers do, then this conclusion should not be at all controversial. With all this evidence for human-caused global warming, it couldn’t simply have just stopped, so the heat must be going somewhere. Scientists have found it in the oceans.

Spread the Word

Awareness of the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming is a key factor in peoples’ decisions whether or not to support action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, there is a gap here due to the public’s lack of awareness of the consensus. Thus it’s critical that we make people aware of these results. To that end, design and advertising firm SJI Associates generously created a website pro-bono, centered around the results of our survey. The website can be viewed at TheConsensusProject.com, and it includes a page where relevant and useful graphics like the one at the top of this post can be shared. You can also follow The Consensus Project on Twitter @ConsensusProj.

Quite possibly the most important thing to communicate about climate change is that there is a 97 percent consensus amongst the scientific experts and scientific research that humans are causing global warming. Let’s spread the word and close the consensus gap.

– By Dana Nuccitelli and John Cook. This piece was originally published at Skeptical Science and was reprinted with permission.

A new report from the House Appropriation committee Democrats found that the Forest service “will have 500 fewer firefighters, 50-70 fewer fire engines, and two fewer aircraft because of sequestration.” Some of the equipment it does still have is outdated — such as the 50-years-old-on-average tanker planes that have crashed multiple times in the last decade, killing 14 people.

A Fox News radio AM talk show expressed incredulity that President Obama and Agriculture Secretary Vilsack “could not find $115 million of fat in the budget so they cut firefighters.” One of the more harmful aspects of sequestration is that the cuts take place “across-the-board” and do not permit the same flexibility in moving funds around within an agency.

Because last year’s wildfire season was so severe, the USDA Forest Service faced a $400 million shortfall for active firefighting and had to borrow money from fire prevention programs to cover the costs. These programs included paying for brush removal from public lands and protecting against invasive plants, disease, insect infestations, and fires. Eventually Congress reimbursed the Forest Service for the shortfall via the 2013 Continuing Resolution but the delays hurt prevention efforts. Last year’s fire season consisted of 67,700 fires burned 9 million acres.

This year, as of May 3, there have been 13,115 wildfires, burning 153,000 acres. Compounding the restraints posed by the inflexible sequester, agencies foresee a $700 million deficit in direct firefighting activities, so similar programs will be de-funded (such as a hazardous-fuels-reduction program to remove long-burning combustible materials from the path of fires).

Congress calculates wildfire suppression funds by averaging the cost over the last ten years. As climate change worsens drought year after year, this calculation becomes deficient. The wildfire season used to range between June and September, but has now expanded to include May and October.

The Western U.S. faces low mountain snowpack, and the most recent U.S. Seasonal Drought Monitor Outlook finds that “drought is forecast to either develop or persist across the western contiguous U.S. as this region enters its dry season.”

Dry conditions in nearly half the country make hampered fire management budgets and sequestration cuts even more dangerous for residents and will lead to even more shortfalls this season. A recent report found that climate change will double the area burned by wildfires by 2050.

Drought and wildfires, in addition to harming people and property, also have dramatic impacts on insects like monarch butterflies, as well as mammals, birds, reptiles, and nearly every plant in the region.

Local communities are trying to face climate adaptation issues alongside the federal government. Texas is preparing for record drought by creating a “rainy day” infrastructure water fund, though none of the legislators acknowledge that climate change is a primary cause of increasing droughts.

A recent report from the General Accounting Office found that the federal government needs to do a better job helping local governments adapt to climate change and integrate climate impacts into infrastructure planning. The report identified roads, bridges, wastewater systems, and federal facilities as particularly vulnerable. Sequestration makes it nearly impossible for the federal government to help local communities adapt to and prepare for climate change-fueled extreme weather and wildfires.